Transcript Kate Bosley on Her Travel Experiences

Transcript – Kate Bosley on her travel experiences

KB:Hi, I’m Kate Bosley and I’m fifty-three years old, and I’ve got a sight problem. I’m a blogger for ‘Limitless Travel’, and ‘Limitless Travel’ is an organisation which looks after and supports people who want to travel but have got disabilities of various sorts. They help them by booking suitable hotels and transport and so on. My blog on ‘Limitless Travel’ is actually telling people about my guide dog, who I’ve had for 5 months, and it’s taken my some time to get used to her. Five months is a short amount of time, so we’re getting used to each other. She’s obviously got to get used to me as well. So the blog highlights some of our challenges and some of our successes of being together.

My sight problem was caused by a head injury which I had almost four years ago. The head injury was very severe; I was ventilated for some time and unconscious for some time. When I came round, it was realised that I’d got a sight defect. My main problem is that I’ve lost a quarter of my visual field, so I actually see very normally in three quarters of what I look at. And I’m completely blind in the bottom right hand corner, which in many ways is a very limited problem. But of course, if something happens to be in the right hand corner, I don’t see it at all – not that I see it weakly or impaired. I just don’t even see it or know that it’s there.

I’ve quite often walked into things. I’ve crossed roads where the car has been in the blind spot. So it does have some issues and some problems. That’s why I’ve got a guide dog. The guide dog allows me to walk safely down the road and I don’t walk into anything on the right hand side. She’s made a very big difference to me.

So what’s the effect of my problems? Well clearly crossing the road is difficult and I have to move the blind spot and be 100% sure that it’s safe to cross. And obviously having a guide dog helps me slow down and do that properly. She’s made a big difference to me. I think the other problem that I have is that people don’t understand what my sight problem is. So they can see that I can see them perfectly clearly if they happen to be on the left side, and not completely understand that I don’t see them weakly; I just don’t even know they’re there if they happen to be in my blind spot. And it is people’s attitudes to that and their understanding of that that I personally have found the most difficult thing.

I loved cycling. I was a great cyclist and we went everywhere, and I have cycled in India and Cuba before my accident. So really it’s not very safe to cycle when you can only see three quarters of your visual field. If there happens to be something like a car in the quarter, cycling is very dangerous. And of course because you’re working at speed when you’re cycling, it makes it even more difficult because I’m not using my head to move the blind spot about and see things. So cycling wasn’t a possible for me.

What we did quite early on was ride a tandem. My husband rides the front, I ride the back, and we’d be… I wouldn’t say everywhere as that would be an exaggeration, but we’ve been lots and lots of places with it and enjoyed it enormously. We did the Alps last year, which actually was extremely difficult on a tandem because tandems don’t like going uphill. They very much like going downhill, and of course they’re a bit fast going downhill.

So my tandem has been very important to me and helped me feel more normal again, and more back to the person that I used to be.

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